Page 1 of The Killer Cupcake
CHAPTER 1
LAC TREMBLANT, QUEBEC – 1978
The promise of a day of fun in the sun did not go as planned. Carmelo had insisted on sailing despite the reports of rain.
"I want to take Nino fishing," he announced after lunch and wiggled his brows.
"Melo? Again?” she sighed.
“What? He wants to fish?” Carmelo shrugged.
“What about the phone? We’re getting it installed today, remember,” she reasoned. “You've taken him three times already.”
"Four times is what I promised," he said with a wink.
"What about your promises to me?" she teased, not wanting to mention the phone again, but she was anxious. She needed to call her baby girl.
He stared at her in a way that warmed her all over.
"Later, I'll fulfill my promise and get my reward. You can count on it," he said.
She shook her head, believing every word. So, they went sailing. And after the rain, the boys were left to their fishing games. From the upper deck that the staff had wiped and dried, she gazed down at them.
Carmelo, with his cigar tucked in the side of his jaw and his hands gripping the large fishing reel as he struggled to pull in some catch. He was shirtless, except for his long, white linen pants and the fisherman's hat his older brother loved for him to wear, while Nino walked around in a captain's uniform and hat. Carmelo would do anything to make his brother smile.
Nino, nearly six feet four and 330 pounds, jumped up and down at Carmelo's side. He clapped with excitement. Both of them were speaking in rapid Italian as Carmelo's men cheered on their boss for his big catch.
Kathy smiled and reclined into her bliss. At forty-eight, she rarely allowed herself such moments of peace, especially not vacations that stretched beyond three or four days. But these were different times. Her husband had earned the right to peace. He’d done the hard work to amend every broken promise or betrayal. Now he needed her. With the war between her community and his escalating into arrests and federal indictments, she lived in constant fear of losing him.
Then came the news that he and Nino had been killed in a car bombing.
For two days, she teetered on the edge of madness, unable to reconcile the mere thought that he would be dead. Not after everything they'd survived in the past thirty years. How could it all end this way? But the news stations and every print magazine or paper in New York insisted he was dead. He was just… gone, ripped away from her. Game over.
Then, the call came.
An F.B.I. agent demanded a meeting.
In the dim glow of her bakery, long after closing, with Brother in the storage room stocking shelves, Debbie at the salon with Daphne tending to customers, and Junior in the streets, the agent delivered the impossible news: her lover, hersecret husband, her best friend, was alive in protective custody. And he needed her.
Now.
She wanted to tell Brother, but the agent said no.
She needed to call Sandy and prepare her, but the agent said there was no time.
The only way she could see Carmelo was in complete secrecy.
She agreed.
Jersey. A plane. Him. It all happened so fast.
She didn't hesitate to celebrate his resurrection by pampering him, spoiling him, holding her tongue from voicing the questions pounding in the back of her mind. He always swore that he was a Wolf, not a Rat. He would never turn against Omertà or La Cosa Nostra. And she believed him.
She couldn't tell Debbie why she was leaving. She couldn't explain to Sandy, still in D.C., how long she'd be gone. None of that mattered. She had to reach him—to care for him, like she always had because loving the Wolf meant tending to the boy trapped inside the man—the boy whose father had tried so hard to destroy.
Now, stranded in Quebec, she hadn't spoken to her family in two weeks. How much longer could the silence last? There had been no plan. No F.B.I. operatives with secret deals to protect him, no whispered strategies to reclaim his life. Just endless, suffocating stillness—broken only by the desperate, love-starved hunger they had for each other.
Morning, noon, night—he consumed her. Sex was always on the menu, as if touch alone could erase the hurt they carried from betraying each other in the past. Between stolen passionate moments on the yacht, in his bed, in the garden, even on the kitchen floor when she escaped him to get something to eat, he crafted distractions: lazy riverside picnics, impulsive drivesthrough the mountains, laughter-filled evenings with Nino in town watching a play reserved for children or a picture show.
